And is she? Well, it beats having him like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, starting like a guilty thing upon a summons, hardly anchored to the earth at all.
A doting lover beats a spectral one any time.
Now all she has to do is convince him his happiness is not the proof that he is at death’s door.
Though he has promised not to involve her in the morbidity of benches, they do occasionally have to rest their legs and sit on one; but only on the understanding that she will sweep it first for plaques, dedications or allusions of any other sort which might destroy his spirits.
‘It’s like having a minder,’ Henry says. ‘Will you now check under the bench for explosive devices?’
‘You’re the explosive device,’ she says. ‘I know where the bomb is. My role is to make sure there are no circumstances in which it might go off.’
He likes the idea of that: Henry the Bomb. Even if the only fallout, these days, is tears creaking in his temples.
On the morning of the day they are due to drive back to St John’s Wood, they sit looking out to sea, enjoying the sun on their faces. On his face, to be precise. Being pale of skin, Moira has to be careful and does not venture out into the sun until she has rubbed sunblock deep into her pores. Henry is amazed at the numbers of tubes and jars of sunblock of varying factors of impermeability she possesses. But by allowing him to apply them for her she forestalls criticism.
‘Choose one for me, Henry,’ she said, this morning.
He wanted to know on what principle.
So she took him through the science: UVAs, UVBs, fierceness of sun divided by time exposed to it determining desired degree of screening. But already she had lost him.
‘This one,’ he said, picking the first to hand, a five- or six-year-old at the seaside, confusing the good time he never had with the telling-off he did.
‘That’s lipsalve,’ she told him.
‘That you don’t need,’ he said, bending to her lips and salving them with his own.
Henry loves kissing her full on the lips.
She wants to read the papers before they go. An old holiday indulgence of hers, reading the paper in the sun, in 50 units of SPF.
She has no preference. Whatever takes her fancy. This morning it is The Times. Henry is reading Newsweek. No reason. He too takes up whatever catches his eye. Whatever doesn’t have news in it, preferably. And not too many stories of the sort that might upset him – other men’s success, etc. Comes to mind that Berryman poem, 53 in The Dream Songs –
It takes me so long to read the ’paper,
said to me one day a novelist hot as a firecracker, because I have to identify myself with everyone in it, including the corpses, pal.
Though Henry’s reasons are not so hotly empathetic. More about identifying himself with everyone not in it. As for actually subscribing to a paper, of knowing what your convictions are, of submitting them to flattery and indulgence every morning – the very idea strikes him as ridiculous. His own ignorance saved him here. Quite old, Henry was, before he could tell the difference, politically, between the Guardian and the Telegraph. Just hadn’t noticed. Never been brought up to notice. His mother always too busy in some other world of affrighted feeling to need newspapers, and his father only ever buying them to cut up. Guardian, Telegraph – who cared? When it came to dodging tales of other men’s success, there was nothing in the end to choose between them. Moira, too, does not ‘have a paper’. It’s another reason they get on. They are both random in their belief systems, not knowing on whose side in any argument they’ll wake up. Moira reads to pass the time, and Henry to vex himself.
Occasionally she passes on an item of gossip. Henry has his fingers in her belt and isn’t listening. It’s music between them, that’s all.
There are glossy giveaways in Newsweek which Henry rolls into balls and throws at the seagulls. In their bullying and persistence, the seagulls remind him of people he has known. Grynszpan and Delahunty.
Moira hits his hand. ‘Don’t make litter,’ she says, still reading.
‘Why? Are you frightened the Cleansing Department might catch me.’
‘Did you post that card to them?’
‘Of course I posted that card to them.’
‘You might hear when you get back.’
‘And I might not.’
‘Do you want to hear?’
‘Of course I want to hear. Why wouldn’t I want to hear?’
They are still making music only to each other, barely attending to the words.
‘I know you,’ she says. ‘You go off things. You get all worked up, then you think better of it.’
‘Well, I’m not going to think better of my mother, am I?’
‘No,’ she says. She is engrossed suddenly. ‘No, I don’t suppose you are.’
He has taken to smoothing the side of her skirt, rubbing her flank in the sun. The flesh and bone of her.
‘Henry,’ she says, lowering the paper, wanting his attention. ‘That person you wrote an article about, the one I found on the Internet, the film man . . .’
‘What about him?’
‘I think he’s in the paper.’
‘Moira, he’s always in the paper.’
‘Is he called Osmond Belkin?’
Henry puts up a hand. ‘Please don’t read anything aloud to me about Osmond Belkin. Not today. It’s too nice here.’
She folds the paper on her lap and leans towards him. ‘Listen to me, Henry, were you very good friends?’
‘Once upon a time.’
She pulls him to her, holding his face. ‘Darling, I’m so sorry,’ she says.
‘What?’ Henry fears a knighthood or a Nobel Prize. ‘What have they given him?’
Her eyes are like seas, sucking him in. Infinite in their consolation.
‘I’m so sorry, darling,’ she says. ‘He’s died. I’m so sorry.’
‘Darling’ – Marghanita ringing him at his office in the Pennines all those years ago – ‘I’m so sorry.’
Daddies turn your face away. Mummies break the news.
So who breaks the news when your mummy and your daddy die? The next mummy.
She is worried about him, sliding her shifty eyes from the road to see how he is taking it.
‘Just concentrate on your driving,’ he tells her, ‘or we’ll be next.’
She has changed her car. Not the make – it’s still a BMW – but the nature. Now, like everyone else in St John’s Wood, she’s driving an adventure wagon, the domestic version of the tank. Henry reckons it’s the fear of Armageddon that explains this. When they blow up St John’s Wood, you’ll need a four-wheel drive to negotiate the rubble. The human imagination can only cope with so much disaster, and a rough terrain is as far as anyone has got. Come Judgement Day they’ll all be masked and in their Range Rovers, but still shopping in the High Street. That’s the advantage of a four-wheel drive – there’s plenty of room for babies in the back seat and provisions in the boot, and you get a good high ride so you can spot the parking spaces in good time.
Sweet, expecting parking meters to be standing and operative. And sweeter still, anticipating using them once civil law has broken down, considering that you never took a blind bit of notice of them before.
In the meantime the High Street is getting narrower by the day with armoured vehicles advancing three abreast on either side, at speeds commensurate with reconnoitring the new season’s stock in the windows of the women’s fashion shops.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ she asks.
He is never all right when she is driving. He would say he is most afraid of her driving when they are on a motorway, were it not that Moira made everywhere a motorway.
‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘Who are you honking?’
Silly question. He knows who she’s honking. She’s honking humanity.
And how fine is Henry?
A tough question. Never seek to ask for whom the bells tolls
– Henry i
s familiar with all that. Having run through his family, death might claim already to be an intimate of Henry’s. In fact that’s not the case. They are not yet on speaking terms. Henry doesn’t mean to be unkind to his family, but their removal wasn’t personal. It was on a different time line. By nabbing ‘Hovis’, however, death has signalled his intentions. Now it’s the turn of your lot, Henry.
One day, though Henry can’t nail it down, ‘Hovis’ threw money at him, coins and notes. Money which Henry had lent ‘Hovis’ and which he had asked to be returned to him. ‘Here, have your shitty money,’ ‘Hovis’ had declared, tossing it into the air and showering Henry with it. Henry can’t remember where this happened. Or exactly how old they were at the time. Or why he had lent money to ‘Hovis’ in the first place, since ‘Hovis’ was never short. Or why it had been necessary to ask for it back. Or why ‘Hovis’ had been so angry with him for doing so. All he can remember is the mortification. Having your own money thrown back at you, the refutation of your original generosity, the demonstration, in other words, of your meanness. For it is meaner to sue for the return of a loan than it would have been to refuse it in the first place. What troubles Henry is that he does not recognise himself in this event, but is ashamed of it nonetheless. Is that what remains, after all that time and all those changes – the shame? Is shame the sole immutable entity?
Who wronged whom in that recollection? Suddenly it is important to decide. Why? Henry knows why. It is because ‘Hovis’ is dead, and the living owe the dead reparation. If Henry wronged ‘Hovis’, now is the time for Henry to acknowledge it.
This is what he is doing in the front seat of Moira’s BMW jeep, when he’s not dodging the oncoming traffic. He is going through the list of all the wrongs he ever visited on ‘Hovis’. Yes, there is the question of the wrongs ‘Hovis’ visited on him, but they do not apply now, ‘Hovis’ having seized the advantage yet again and died first. And would ‘Hovis’ have been making conscientious mental reparation to Henry, had it been the other way round?
‘Sorry, Henry, for calling you a girl. Sorry if that contributed in any measure to your having a shit life. Sorry for having such a good life myself. Tactless of me. Sorry about that.’
Fat chance, Henry thinks. But such certainty is itself a perpetuation of an older wrong. Still at it, Henry, still thinking ill of your best friend? Who, alas, can no longer defend himself.
Am I glad? Henry wonders. Am I, in some small disreputable part of myself, glad that he is dead?
He hears the tears well up for ‘Hovis’. Hears them muster, hears their pricking behind his eyes, like the sound of needles going into tracing paper, but they don’t fall. Won’t fall. Well, Henry is damned if he is going to castigate himself for that. He has cried a lot in Eastbourne. Even the softest-hearted man can run out of tears temporarily. Besides, there is a tight band of pain across his chest. His pulse is not even. There is a dull pain in his head, at the very top, where the skull feels thinnest. And the woman he loves is concerned for him. All these are signs, surely, that although he isn’t weeping, he is in genuine distress.
Yes, but is he in distress for ‘Hovis’?
Or is he in distress because he isn’t?
Moira wants to know if he would care to stop for tea.
‘I am all right,’ he says. ‘I would care to go slower, but otherwise I am all right.’
‘Are you sure?’ she says, looking sideways at him, taking one hand off the wheel and resting it on his knee.
‘I am sure.’
His voice is grave, as befits the gravity of the day. Grave and brave.
Suddenly, he discovers an impulse in himself to laugh. What is he doing being grave and brave?! The effrontery of me, he thinks. Pretending to feelings there is every chance I do not have, because if I had them I would not be questioning their whereabouts. What a fraud!
He turns to look at Moira, squint-eyed at her wagon wheel, driving as always like some vengeful charioteer, fired with vendetta. ‘Do you know what?’ he says, not at all sure that he can prevent the laughter erupting from his chest. ‘Do you know what? . . . I think I might be too all right.’
‘That’s normal,’ she says. ‘It’ll take time to sink in.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘I mean more than that. I think I might be relieved he’s dead.’
‘Well, that too is a normal feeling,’ she says, rubbing the palm of her hand into his knee, making absent-minded circles of condolence, ‘if he’s been suffering a long time.’
‘You’re not hearing me,’ he says, knowing he can’t stop it now, knowing that the laughter must have its way with him. ‘What I’m saying – ha! – is that I’m glad, for me . . .’
But when the laughter comes it isn’t what he thinks it is. It is, after all, an outpouring of grief.
Which gives Moira the opportunity to swerve from the fast lane to the slow lane without acknowledging the middle lane, and bring him skidding on to the hard shoulder, where, on her shoulder, and for the second time in as many days, he sobs like an abandoned baby.
And then there are the obituaries for Henry to contend with. Full-blown obituaries too, big pictures of ‘Hovis’ at his most loaf-headed, some of the eulogiums three-quarters of a page in length. Call no man happy until he’s dead. Well, you can say that again, muses Henry at his little table on St John’s Wood High Street, immured in newsprint. Who will ever speak this warmly about a man until he’s cold? Osmond’s illness bravely borne, his beautiful devoted wife, the children in whom he took, etc., etc., and who took in him blah blah, the grandchildren in whom he took still more, his going where others had not dared, his unparalleled contribution to neo-realistic cinema in a country which, before he had the foresight, heigh-ho, an intellectual among entertainers, an entertainer among intellectuals . . .
Yes, yes, Henry thinks, a giant among dwarves, a dwarf among giants, a man among girls, a girl among men – except that that’s him, Henry, about whom not a word will be written when his turn comes. So call no man happy until he’s dead, and not very men happy even after that.
‘This a good idea?’ Moira asks him. She is serving him this morning, as in the old days of their courtship, harassed in her maid-of-all-work flatties. Only she has a better understanding today – now that he has divulged all to her – of his unpleasant nature.
Though having coming clean in the car, Henry is in denial on the pavement. ‘Is what a good idea?’
She flicks his paper. ‘That.’
‘Why shouldn’t it be? He was my friend.’
She leaves him to it.
He has a reason for going through each obituary painstakingly. Spare his blushes, but Henry is looking for some mention of himself. ‘ As Belkin said in his last recorded interview, the unseen influence on his work was and always had been Henry Nagel, the childhood friend without whom . . .’ That sort of thing. Insane, he knows it. But madder hopes are realised. People win lotteries at however many millions to one. How many millions to one against Belkin expending his dying breath on Henry? Or against an obituary writer who has done his homework coming up with Henry’s name – school friend, rival, sometime critic, and so on. Fewer, surely. Easier to be remembered in an elegy to an old mate, at least, than to thread a camel through the eye of a needle.
Whether or not, there is no mention. As he was removed from Osmond’s life in life, so Henry is removed from Osmond’s life in death.
The which being the case, there is nothing to stop Henry sliding into a broiling ravine of resentment and left-outness.
Doesn’t being alive help the smallest bit? The daylight? The soft air? The blue of the sky? The warm populousness of the street? The sounds of voices, footfalls, music, traffic, honking? The fact that he has Viennese coffee and sachertorte on a china plate before him? Moira? Whereas ‘Hovis’ is deaf and blind now, without touch, without smell, without future, a disgrace?
No, nothing helps. What Henry wants is a mention. Or better than a mention, an obituary of his own. His photograph in t
he papers, his life told and retold in all its epic heroism, his dates commemorated as though history is not complete without them. Osmond Belkin – 1943–2003 . There it is. Irrefutable. The span of time arched like a bridge over obscurity. Sure, it’s time passed, time done with, but those years have passed for Henry too, and who would bet on his bending history to his will in the years that are left?
Even vanished, ‘Hovis’ has the beating of him.
Moira comes out again and sits with him. ‘Look how lovely the day is,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ he says.
‘We could go for a walk after lunch. Do the park.’
‘Yes,’ he says.
She means well. She is the voice of life to him. But what does life have going for it when the sirens are calling you from the other place?
‘Snap out,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ he says. He would like to. But he’s in deep trouble. He might not know much about much, as they used to say in the Pennines, but he does know that once you start envying the dead you are in deep trouble.
FOURTEEN
A letter arrives from Cleansing. They cannot tell him who donated the bench in his mother’s name. Data protection. If, however, he can show exceptional circumstances . . .
‘We’re going round in circles,’ he says to Moira.
‘Write to them again,’ she tells him.
‘Saying what?’
‘Saying that if they will not make you acquainted with the donor, would they please make the donor acquainted with you. Normal business practice, Henry. You make your address available to the protected party. You can even send them a stamped addressed envelope.’
‘And what if the protected party’s dead?’
She is losing patience with him. Him and death. ‘If he’s dead then that’s the end of it.’
‘What makes you think it’s a he?’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Henry.’
Time was, a bit of horseplay might have followed that. But Henry’s gone ghostly on her again.
The Making of Henry Page 29